Been thinking, on Love and Doctrine

So I've been reading some other blogs lately, and I've been reading the news as always and I've come across a thing that I'm having a hard time with.

Background
A blogger by the username Leslie Wolf, by all accounts and educated and faith-filled individual, has recently written about problems in the "Reformed Church" that center around, if I may cruelly shorten his point, Christians not having enough love.

He was talking in the blog about a smugness of doctrine that he has experienced in some churches and some meanness with pastors and teachers saying inaccurate or just mean things about Christians in other groups.

Also, I was reading about a recent meeting of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI with the Anglican patriarch, and some other news surrounding that, which you can google if you want. Short story, a while back there were some Anglicans ticked that the Catholic Church was making it easier for Anglicans to convert.

Anyways, all this has me thinking. Are we too obsessed with who is right, and not concerned enough with loving our neighbors as the Lord commanded?

Well the short answer is yes, I can agree with that. But I'm afraid of the pendulum swinging to far the other way.

I guess one can ask if one can follow the Lord's commands "too much," but I would say yes to that.

The line from Luke 10:27 reads "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind: and thy neighbour as thyself."

So yes that love of neighbor is so important, but the man speaking to Jesus in this line, which Jesus affirms as true, doesn't start off with the bit about his neighbor. He starts it off with God.

We have tremendous duty to love and care for each other, all of us, no matter the denomination or faith or lack of it. We are called to love all God's people. This is true, and critical.

But our first duty is to God, who is truth. If we were to deny any truth out of a misguided attempt to love, we would be in the wrong. We would be disrespecting the Lord.

I believe most people make this distinction OK. But some in these days seem to feel that to show love means to grant acceptance, either blatant acceptance, or acceptance by silence, or things that are not true, and of ways that are not right.

Members of the Church are seen as intolerant to rightly proclaim the belief that while all persons are made in God's image and have the dignity there associated, those who participate in sinful activities such as premarital sex, or abortions or anything else, are in the wrong.

Who are you to judge, they ask. Who indeed.

But we are called to judge actions. Not rashly. Not harshly. To quote John "Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.”

I've gone and rambled again.

But my point is, that truth, and that truth which is preserved by right doctrine, is something that believers have a responsibility too.

We are to love God first. And to love God is to be faithful to his commands. One of his commands is to love one another, and so the key is strike the right balance in this regard.

I don't believe I do this very well, and I pray that God gives me the wherewithal to get better at it. In practice and in person, I believe I show acceptable charity to those who engage me in spiritual debates, but online, I often do not.

I often lump all Protestants, or an even more frequent target of mine in non-denominationalists, into one groups with straw-man ideologies.

This is bad, and for it, I'm sorry, and I'll try to do better.

I can do a better job of being a loving member of Christ's Church, and I will. I bet most of us can do better, and should.

In the process, let's try to remember that we can be loving, without giving ground on the truth.